Social Media: Who, what, when, where and why?

I recently had the opportunity to attend a conference where the hosting company made a valiant attempt at integrating social media into every aspect of the conference. However, their attempts often fell short and left me wondering what was the point of all of this stuff anyway?

The reality is, we know people use social media and its not going away. (If you have any doubts, check out this video.) But working in the marketing department of a B-2-B company who has only begun to dabble in social media, I find myself struggling with the same challenges as everyone else in the space – how do we use social media in way that provides value to our customers?

In journalism, the first thing they teach you about writing a good article is to answer the questions of who, what, when, where, and why within the first paragraph. The goal being that one should be able to read the first paragraph of an article and get all important elements without ever reading the rest.

So I find myself taking a step back and embracing these same basics as it relates to social media:

·     Who is using social media in the B-2-B space?

·     What social media outlets are you using?

·     When do you reach out to social media?

·     Why do you use social media?

While I could post paragraph upon paragraph about tekservePOS' perception of these answers, we would rather hear it direct from you. Over the next few months we will be doing some surveys at tekSESSIONS, through email and just making some plain old phone calls to gather information so we can provide you more value through the use of social media. Any comments are also welcome here at tekBLOG.